Torres claimed he was signed from Liverpool in January 2011 to play alongside Nicolas Anelka but he was soon relegated to the bench. And British football’s record signing has never really established himself as the first-choice striker at Stamford Bridge - and he confesses his game has suffered.

“I understood nothing of what had happened,” he told French magazine So Foot. “I started to get to know the bench. I reassured myself by saying things would soon change. Villas-Boas arrived, then Di Matteo but it was always the same: one day I played, the next not.

“When you play, you do not ask yourself how it feels to be on the bench. You have to live it to understand how difficult it is to be there without being there.

“To enter a match knowing you do not have the confidence of the coach. To play when you simply don’t have the habit of playing. Me, I felt bizarre, I had the feeling of getting tired quicker, of being heavier. I had no gas. You have to fight against a lot of things to get off the bench, sometimes even against yourself.

Normal self: Torres in an all-too-rare moment of joy for Chelsea

"Today, I am a different player but I am not going to lie to you: the player that I was, the one who started all the matches with a guaranteed place, I really miss sometimes. At one point, I even sat myself down to watch videos of my goals: I wanted to understand what I was doing before when I was scoring.

“I concluded that the only thing that had changed was the colour of the shirt. Everything is a question of adaptation to the playing style of a team. There are the styles which suit me well and others less - that is all.”

Torres scored 11 goals last season - including the winner on the last day at Cardiff - but Jose Mourinho blamed his lack of strikers on the lack of silverware this season. He is still intent on signing at least one new striker this summer.

But the Spaniard, now 30, insisted: “I am going to continue to work to make him change his opinion. Mourinho his confidence between Samuel, Demba and me but for him that is not enough. Clearly his aim is to sign another attacker for next season.

"There is not a lot to analyse. It is not possible to read it another way: he is not completely satisfied with our performances and that is all. All that is left for us to do is to prove that we can be the striker he is looking for.”

Mourinho infuriated Eto’o by joking about the age of the now-departed Cameroon striker. Asked how the former Barcelona and Inter Milan striker reacted, Torres said: “Eto’o is Eto’o. It needs more than that to unsettle him.”